Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French graphic novelist, filmmaker and activist whose autobiographical work Persepolis introduced millions of Western readers to life inside post-revolutionary Iran, has died in Paris at the age of 56. Those close to her told news agency AFP that she had "died of sadness" a little over a year after the death of her husband, Swedish producer and screenwriter Mattias Ripa, whom she described in recent Instagram posts as "the love of my life."

Born on 22 November 1969 in Rasht, a city in northern Iran, Satrapi grew up in a relatively liberal, intellectual family in Tehran. She came of age during one of the most turbulent periods in modern Iranian history: the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which swept away the monarchy of the Shah and established a theocratic government that imposed strict social and religious codes on everyday life. Satrapi's four-volume graphic memoir Persepolis — first published in 2000 and later collected in two volumes — recounted that childhood with humour, tenderness and unflinching honesty, following her through the revolution, the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, years of exile as a teenager in Austria, and her eventual permanent move to France in the early 1990s. Written in stark black-and-white, the series sold well over a million copies worldwide. As Satrapi wrote in its preface, her intention was clear: "One must not forget those Iranians who lost their lives in prison fighting for freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive systems, or who were forced to flee."

In 2007, Satrapi co-directed an animated film adaptation of Persepolis, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2008. The film, which featured the voices of Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, brought her story to an even wider global audience. Satrapi told the Guardian in 2024 that the work was fundamentally about compelling Western readers to recognise the full humanity of Iranian people: "Oh, they're actually human beings like us." French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to "a great artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable," while the President of the French National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, wrote that Satrapi had "turned her work into an act of freedom."

Beyond Persepolis, Satrapi had a prolific career in both literature and film. Her other graphic novels include Embroideries and Chicken with Plums, the latter of which she also adapted for cinema in 2011. As a film director, she went on to make the dark comedy The Voices (2014), starring Ryan Reynolds, and Radioactive (2019), a biopic of the pioneering physicist Marie Curie starring Rosamund Pike. She remained a fierce and outspoken critic of Iran's government throughout her life, supporting the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement that erupted across Iran following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini — a young woman who died after being detained by the morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab correctly. Satrapi edited a collective graphic anthology on the protests in 2023. In a final act of political independence, she refused France's prestigious Légion d'honneur in 2025, accusing her adopted country of "hypocrisy" in its dealings with Iran.

Fellow comic artists mourned her deeply. French cartoonist Joann Sfar wrote: "You changed the world with your comics, and comics meant nothing to you. I have lost my twin sister." Satrapi, who described herself as feeling "Western in Iran and Iranian in the West," left behind an artistic legacy that redrew the boundaries of the graphic novel as a serious literary form — and gave a lasting human face to one of the most misunderstood nations of modern times.